Shuttle XPC SZ170R8 V2: Small but Powerful

Compact, efficient and incredibly powerful if you spring for the right parts, the Shuttle XPS SZ170R8 V2 has a lot going for it. The small form factor of the motherboard does not take away from its power. Even better is its capability as a portable machine.

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Japanese cake brand, Anime Sugar, has a tradition of releasing Christmas-themed anime cakes every holiday season, and they have announced something huge for one of this year’s biggest and most popular TV anime, Re:Zero. For their Re:Zero campaign, they are not only offering some cake, but also a special Re:Zero non-alcoholic champaigne, and a dakimakura featuring...

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Externally, the Corsair Accelerator drive is not larger neither much different than any other 2.5” SATA SSD drive. The chassis is sprayed with a smooth matte black paint and the corners are rounded. A large sticker covers most of the top side of the chassis. Tipping the scales at less than 75gr, the device is frighteningly lightweight, even for a SSD drive.

A product/production number of no significant value to retail users is printed at the front side of the chassis in large white letters.

The bottom of the drive is almost entirely bare, with the exception of two stickers. One of the stickers has the Dataplex software serial number printed on it, while the other is a small oval warranty sticker, the placement of which is quite strange since the chassis of this drive is not being held closed by screws.

The user needs to make sure that the Dataplex software series is written down inside the manual or any other secure place prior to installing the drive. Be warned that the Dataplex software recognizes hardware changes of more than 2 parts as a different system; the user needs to uninstall and reinstall the software prior to major hardware upgrades or will have to contact Corsair Support to unblock the serial.

After cracking open the Accelerator, we realized the reason of its very little weight. The PCB housing every component of the drive is barely half as large as the actual chassis, which could have been well smaller if not restricted by 2.5” disk drive size standards.

Corsair went with a Sandforce SF-2181 controller for their caching offering, a SATA-II compliant chip, essentially limiting the drive’s maximum read and write speeds at about 280MB/s. However, the Corsair Accelerator is using no over-provisioning at all, meaning that the 60GB of the drive are all available for data hot-caching.

The NAND flash memory chips of the drive are supplied by Micron. The Micron 29F64G08CBAAA-A used in the Accelerator are asynchronous-type memory chips, commonly found in middle-range and value drives.